


The Subconscious Hivemind International Experiment in Longterm Dreaming (S.H.I.E.L.D.)

by crackdkettle



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Inception Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-23 03:28:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21313426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crackdkettle/pseuds/crackdkettle
Summary: When Steve Rogers is twenty-six, he watches his best friend fall from a train in 1945.When Steve Rogers is twenty, he wakes up in California in 2014 and discovers Bucky Barnes may never have existed at all.An Inception AU.
Relationships: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Peggy Carter/Angie Martinelli
Comments: 36
Kudos: 87
Collections: Stucky Big Bang 2019





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my contribution to the Stucky Big Bang 2019, which motivated me to actually write a fic idea I’ve been kicking around for about five years. The art is by the lovely and amazingly talented [ilittleladyfinger](https://iladylittlefinger.tumblr.com/).
> 
> Please be aware that as this is an Inception AU, characters frequently shoot themselves/others in order to wake up, but it’s not graphic and no is actually trying to die.

The first thing Steve notices when he wakes up is that there’s a needle in his arm. The second is the gentle hum of a PASIV.

The third is that he knows what a PASIV is.

He sits up abruptly, yanking out the needle with a wince. He’s in a bed in a dimly-lit dormitory with two rows of beds — he estimates about thirty beds total. Each one is occupied and he appears to be the only one awake. He doesn’t recognize the dreamers closest to him.

How did this happen?

A door at the far end of the dormitory opens and a young lieutenant enters. She looks worried.

“Sergeant Rogers,” she says, approaching him quickly. “You aren’t supposed to be awake.”

“What?” says Steve, scrambling out of the bed. “Where am I?”

Memories are coming back to him, fragmented and confused. He’d been tapped for a special experiment. Supersoldiers.

No, that’s not right. Dream-sharing.

It suddenly occurs to him that people can’t peel off their faces.

“You’ll need to come with me for debriefing,” says the lieutenant. Her name, Steve remembers, is Rodriguez. She’d briefed him before he went under.

Steve doesn’t move.

“I want to talk to Agent Carter.”

“I’m sorry?” says Rodriguez.

“Peggy Carter. Margaret Carter,” says Steve impatiently. “She was my— my liaison. During the— in the dream.” He stumbles a little over the last word.

“If she’s still under, we can’t wake her,” says Rodriguez. “Not without significant risk. She could be permanently brain-damaged or—”

“Abraham Erskine, then,” says Steve. “He should be awake. He died before me.”

Odd, he thinks in a detached sort of way, that he stumbled over _dream_ but not _died._

“No one woke up before you,” says Rodriguez.

Steve stares at her. But if that’s true… if no one woke up before him…

“Dr. Erskine was a projection?”

Rodriguez’s expression softens.

“Sergeant Rogers,” she says gently, “you’ve been through quite an ordeal. If you’ll just come with me.”

Numbly, Steve follows her out of the dormitory and across a hallway into a room with about a dozen computer monitors. He’s familiar enough with dream-sharing technology to recognize that over half of them are monitoring brainwaves. In the lower right-hand corner of each monitor is a timestamp moving far more rapidly than any normal clock. Two captains are sitting in front of the computers, eyes flicking from screen to screen. They glance up as Steve and Rodriguez enter.

“Good morning, sergeant,” says one. “Nice nap?”

“Well, well, well,” says a voice from behind Steve, before he can answer. “Looks like we have our first casualty. How’s the war effort, Rogers?”

Steve turns to find a colonel standing in the doorway, eyeing him with interest.

“Sir,” says Steve, saluting automatically as he reads the colonel’s name badge: Pierce.

“What year’d he get pulled out?” Pierce asks, looking past Steve at one of the captains.

“1945,” she answers. “A few weeks before V-E Day.”

Pierce makes an unhappy noise.

“Barely nine years,” he says. “Not gonna get much data from that. Let’s hope the others keep themselves alive longer.”

“What are you talking about?” says Steve.

“Still doing better than the shitshow at Hood,” says the other captain, as if Steve hadn’t spoken.

“What are you talking about?” Steve repeats. “What’s going on?”

Pierce sighs.

“Return to your quarters, Rogers,” he says. “We’ll call you in for a debrief in a few hours.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” says Steve.

“That was an order, sergeant,” says Pierce harshly.

“With respect, _sir_,” says Steve, “my friends are still in there. They think I’m dead. You have to put me back under.”

“I don’t _have_ to do anything, sergeant,” says Pierce. “And you’re looking at a court martial if you continue to defy a direct order.”

“Sergeant Rogers,” says Rodriguez gently, “in a few days, your friends will know you’re alive and well.”

Steve gapes at her. “A few _days_?”

“Lieutenant!” says Pierce sharply.

For the first time, Steve really looks at the timestamp on the nearest computer screen.

“A few days will be decades in there,” he says with dawning horror. “A lifetime.”

“Theoretically,” says one of the captains without even looking at him.

“You can’t do that,” says Steve. “You can’t let people live whole lives and then take them away!”

“They knew what they were signing up for,” says Pierce.

“I can assure you,” says Steve coldly, “they didn’t.”

“Well, I’m afraid it’s out of both our hands, Rogers,” says Pierce. “Tell him, captain.”

The captain closest to them turns slightly.

“We’re using a new, extremely powerful compound,” he says. “Between that and the tech we’re using, like Rodriguez said, we can’t wake anyone out here without risking brain-damage, possibly death. And we can’t put you back under without compromising the entire experiment.”

“If you made people aware of the dream in there, it could be just as damaging as trying to wake them out here,” the other captain adds.

“Fine,” says Steve. “Just one last question. You said I was the first one to wake up, but that can’t be true. What happened to Bucky Barnes?”

The captains glance at each other uncomfortably.

“Who?” says one.

“James Buchanan Barnes.”

“There’s no one involved in the experiment by that name,” Rodriguez interjects, but Steve doesn’t believe her.

He can’t.

“That’s impossible,” he says simply.

But even as he says it he remembers that he hadn’t known Bucky before the experiment — that though Bucky had always been in Steve’s dream life, he’d never been in his waking one — that he really might have been—

“Sergeant Rogers,” says Rodriguez quietly, “I know this is a lot to process. Let’s just get you back to your quarters.”

“Of course,” says Steve. “Of course. Let’s go.”

She gestures for him to precede her out of the room. As Steve turns into the hallway, Pierce stops Rodriguez, and Steve pauses just out of sight to listen. He doesn’t catch everything Pierce says, but he is able to make out one phrase: “Wipe him.”

“Everything okay?” he asks Rodriguez when she catches up to him.

“Fine,” she says, giving him an unconvincing smile.

They’re not even halfway to the barracks when Steve knows something is very, very wrong; so when the four-person security team appears around a corner, he’s already prepared. His real-world body — not as short and scrawny as his pre-serum dream-self had been, but certainly not the Adonis the serum had made him, either — might not remember being injected with a supersoldier serum, but his mind does. What he now lacks in strength, he more than makes up for in agility. In less than a minute the security team is disarmed and unconscious, and Rodriguez has her hands up as she stares down the barrel of the pistol Steve is pointing at her.

“Where is James Buchanan Barnes?” Steve’s voice and hands are steady.

“There’s no one involved in the experiment by that name,” says Rodriguez, and any other time Steve would be impressed that there’s no quaver in her voice, but he’s too furious right now.

“Don’t lie to me,” he growls. The gun shakes slightly, and Rodriguez winces.

“There’s no one involved by that name _here_,” she amends.

“What does that mean?” Steve demands.

“The experiment goes beyond this base,” says Rodriguez. “It’s a collaboration between the militaries and intelligence agencies of twenty-three countries around the world. This is dream-sharing on a global scale. Any person you met in the dream could have been a projection or could have been someone hooked into the dream halfway across the world — there’s really no way to know. I don’t know if anyone has the full list of names. If they aren’t on this base, I can’t help you. I’m sorry.” She sounds like she might actually mean it.

Steve stares at her.

“You have no idea what you’re doing. You’re destroying lives. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives.”

“We’re not destroying anything,” says Rodriguez, a pleading note entering her voice for the first time. “It’s just a dream. It’s not real, Rogers. None of it was real.”

“It was the most real thing I’ve ever known,” says Steve and brings the butt of the gun crashing down on her head.

\-----

Steve’s mother died in 1936, the spring before he turned eighteen, leaving him a lease he could barely afford and little else. Steve refused to move in with the Barneses, so Bucky spent the summer trying to wear him down.

“Just come home with me,” he pleaded every time he dropped Steve off at his apartment.

“I’m fine, Buck,” Steve insisted. “You know I don’t like imposing on your folks.”

“Then at least let me stay with you,” said Bucky, who had, to his credit, given up insisting Steve wasn’t imposing years ago. “I hate the thought of you being here alone.” He always talked as though Steve’s choices were made specifically to upset him.

Even so, Steve rarely let him stay over. If he did, Bucky would notice and repair the leaky faucet, or find and want to replace the broken back window, or go through Steve’s practically empty cupboards and buy him groceries, and Steve didn’t want to be in Bucky’s debt more than he already was.

“You don’t owe me anything,” Bucky always insisted as he stocked Steve’s pantry. “It’s what friends do.”

“It’s not what I do,” said Steve unhappily.

“You would if you could,” Bucky answered, shrugging.

“You don’t know that,” Steve retorted, even though it was true. “It’s not like I’ve had the opportunity.”

“You’ve done plenty for me,” said Bucky, but when Steve pressed him for specifics, he just changed the subject.

When the lease was up in September, Steve finally agreed to move in with him — their own place, not Bucky’s parents’. He suspected — but could never prove — that Bucky contributed more to the grocery fund and carried out household repairs behind Steve’s back, but at least now Steve wasn’t the only one benefitting from Bucky’s generosity.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Bucky, the only time Steve bothered to accuse him of paying more than his half of the bills. “I’m sure you’ll pay me back once you become a famous artist.”

“You might be waiting awhile.” Steve crumpled up a horrible half-finished sketch and tossed it toward the fire. It missed by several feet.

“I doubt as long as you seem to think,” said Bucky as he picked up the sketch and smoothed it out again. Steve thought he saw a shadow pass across Bucky’s face before he added, “Before you know it, you’ll have enough to square with me _and_ take care of your girl.”

Steve laughed.

“I don’t have a girl,” he reminded Bucky.

Bucky shrugged.

“You’ll get one,” he said with a small smile. It didn’t quite reach his eyes, but Steve just attributed that to the blatant lie.

\-----

It doesn’t take him long to make it off the base. He takes his own car, drives in a random direction for about an hour, ditches it in a parking lot, hotwires a pick-up that’s old enough to not have GPS, and drives back the way he came for over thirty minutes before veering off. He has no idea where he’s going or how he plans to find Bucky. His first thought is Brooklyn, but he doesn’t know how much the military knows about his Dream life — if they know much, Brooklyn is the first place they’ll look for him.

Bits and pieces of his pre-Dream life are coming back to him. The basic structure is the same as his Dream life, but the details are different: he grew up in Pasadena, not in Brooklyn. His parents are both dead, but his father was killed in the line of duty as a firefighter, not in World War I, a few months before Steve was born, and his mother died of cancer, instead of tuberculosis, when he was eighteen. He enlisted in the Army shortly afterward (but didn’t have to lie on his enlistment form) and did a tour in Afghanistan before being recruited for the dream-sharing program and consequently stationed in San Luis Obispo. He thinks that was about six months ago, but his sense of time is off thanks to the Dream.

He’s still not sure how Bucky, Peggy, Erskine, or the supersoldier experiment fit into all of this. It seems unlikely that Erskine could have been Steve’s projection, given the scale of the Dream and the damage Schmidt did before Steve ever made it to Europe.

Unless Schmidt…

Unless _Bucky_…

He dismisses that thought immediately. Bucky hadn’t felt like a projection.

Then again, no one had.

_Pull it together, Rogers_. He has to proceed as if everyone in the Dream was real. He can guess easily enough that Erskine woke up in Germany and Peggy is probably still plugged in somewhere in the U.K., which means he can’t go looking for them right away since air travel is impossible until he can get a new identity. For now he’ll have to restrict his search to the Americas — a big enough job in the U.S. alone, which he can only assume (hope) is where Bucky is.

There’s only one real option if he wants information on dream-sharing.

He turns the truck east.

\-----

His plan is to hang around the Vegas dream dens, ask discreet questions, and maybe hook up with a crew if it comes to it. The underground dream-share community is far larger than it was even five years ago, which makes it easy to invent an identity: Carter Barnes, an ex-military architect from Paramus.

He spends the first few days near dream dens but not actually in them, casually chatting at bars with women in high heels and men in crisp suits, conversations heavy with allusion but far too vague to be incriminating. His alias doesn’t raise any eyebrows or prompt any confidences about other ex-military Barneses, which is disappointing if more or less expected. By the end of the week he’s hooked up with a couple up-and-comers for a simple corporate off-the-books extraction: in, out, easy.

Or it should be.

Four weeks of planning later, Steve’s with the extractor, Garrett, in the dream-replica of the mark’s basement, watching Garrett try to crack the safe.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

Steve freezes. He knows that voice, knows it better than his own skin. Slowly, he turns toward it, hoping and not wanting to hope.

The mark is standing at the bottom of the stairway, and standing beside him is—

“Bucky.” Steve breathes the name more than says it.

He’s more beautiful than Steve remembers: he’s not dressed in any of his military uniforms, but in a threadbare grey t-shirt and his favorite pair of worn out blue jeans, and his hair is longer than military regulation, soft-looking locks falling almost into his eyes.

“Who the hell is Bucky?” demands Garrett, snapping Steve back to the present. “What’s going on, Barnes?”

“You shouldn’t be here,” Steve tells Bucky.

The projection of Bucky.

“Neither should you,” says Bucky. “The man I knew would never steal for profit.”

“_Barnes_.” Garrett sounds pissed.

“The man you knew didn’t exist,” says Steve quietly.

“For fuck’s sake!” snaps Garrett, exasperated, and shoots Bucky between the eyes.

“No!” Steve screams, and before he even knows what he’s doing, he’s slashed Garrett’s throat.

The basement starts to collapse. Steve gives one more agonized look at Bucky’s crumpled body, lying at the bemused mark’s feet, before shooting himself.

“Hurry,” he says to Garrett as soon as he opens his eyes. “He’ll be waking up in a second.”

“What the hell, asshole?” Garrett snarls as Steve packs up the PASIV. “You totally screwed us in there!”

“No, _you_ screwed us!” Steve snaps, whirling on him. “I was handling it.”

“Like hell you were,” says Garrett. “You were out of control!”

“You shot my—”

“Projection!” Garrett finishes. “It was a projection, Barnes. A nasty one.”

“He was harmless,” Steve growls.

“_It’s_ a problem,” says Garrett. “And you’d better get a handle on it if you want to keep working in this business.”

“Thanks for the advice,” says Steve coldly.

“Look, I don’t know what happened in there, and I don’t really care. I’m outta here before he makes us all,” says Hardy, the third member of the crew, jerking her head toward the mark. “But you boys have fun in prison. Amateurs,” she adds in disgust, as Steve and Garrett follow her lead.

That night, Steve plugs into a PASIV alone for the first time.

\-----

The fiasco with Garrett and Hardy burns him in Vegas, so he tries New Orleans next, where Garrett’s blacklisted and so hopefully his stories carry less weight. He knows he should change his alias but he can’t bring himself to abandon his last connection with the Dream.

He decides to bypass the bar scene this time and go straight to the dream dens.

This turns out to be a mistake. He’s barely been in the city forty-eight hours when one moment he’s haggling with a chemist over the cost of an hour under, and the next he’s caught in the middle of a full-blown raid. Which is when he discovers that it’s not easy to overpower an entire tactical team when you’re not actually a superhuman with an indestructible shield.

Who’d’ve thought.

What _is_ surprising is when a guy drops out of the ceiling and takes out the agents holding Steve with an honest-to-god bow and arrow like some kind of black ops Robin Hood.

“Wha—? Who are you? Where did you come from?” Steve stammers as the guy steps over an unconscious agent and pulls out a knife, inches from Steve’s chest.

“My name is Clint Barton,” he says, cutting the ziptie around Steve’s wrists. “I’m looking for answers too.”

\-----

Hardy wouldn’t do the job unless Garrett and Steve had totems. Steve’s military program, naturally, hadn’t used totems, since the experiment hinged on its subjects accepting the Dream as reality. 

“You know totems aren’t always effective, right?” said Garrett, rolling his eyes, when Hardy brought them up.

“Neither are seat belts, but I still wear mine,” she quipped.

Steve chose a pair of dog tags as his: one with his WWII ID number, one with Bucky’s. He can’t risk putting either of their names on them, of course, but when he’s under alone he’ll let them appear. Sometimes he holds them in one loose fist and makes them melt together, the names and numbers morphing into one identity: _Steve Rogers-Barnes_; and below that, _569 Leaman Place, Apt 2C, New York, NY 11224_ — the address of the apartment he shared with Bucky for nearly seven years.

His home that no longer exists.

That never did.

\-----

“What makes you think I’m looking for answers?” Steve asks warily.

Clint looks up from searching what appears to be the head agent, and it registers that he can’t be more than five or six years older than Steve himself, though there’s something in his eyes and voice that makes him seem decades older.

“For one thing, most guys don’t bust out of a perfectly good hiding place to start a fight in the middle of a raid,” he says. “But mostly, because you’re Captain America.”

Steve freezes.

“What did you say?” He fumbles for the dog tags under his shirt.

“Captain America,” Clint repeats, as if this isn’t a life-shattering thing to say. He pulls out the agent’s phone and presses the unconscious man’s thumb against the home button. “Blue tights, wings on the head, shiny shield… any of this ringing a bell?”

“How do you—?” Steve starts, but breaks off, shaking his head. The tags are remaining stubbornly separate, which can only mean one thing. “You were in the war?”

“No,” says Clint, without looking up from the phone. “I didn’t get plugged in until the nineties. I saw your Smithsonian exhibit though. Inspiring stuff.”

“Thank you,” says Steve. “Wait, I have a Smithsonian exhibit?”

“Not out here,” says Clint. He slips the phone back in its owner’s pocket and stands up. “But we can rehash fake history later. Right now, we need to haul ass.”

“Not without answers,” says Steve.

“I got ’em,” says Clint, shaking another phone at Steve. “All we’re gonna get out of these guys, anyway. Cloned the phone. Let’s get out of here and see what we’re dealing with.”

\-----

Clint’s safe house is wired with computers, surveillance equipment, and an arsenal of arrows.

“Who were you in there?” Steve can’t help asking.

“Same guy as out here,” says Clint as he plugs the cloned phone into one of the computers. “A spy. Or I was.” He gives a grim laugh. “Now I’m just a guy who lost his partner and is pissed as hell.”

“I know the feeling,” says Steve.

“Yeah, the alias kind of gives it away,” says Clint, starting to flick through files. “Carter Barnes? That’s cute.”

Steve gapes at him. “I never said—”

“You’re _Captain America_,” says Clint. “I’ve been on your ass since you showed up two days ago. The beard’s a nice touch but I’m sure I’m not the first one to make you. I doubt I’m the only person in the whole experiment who went to a museum in there, even if everyone’s too chickenshit to admit they were part of it.”

“Yeah, no one’s been very forthcoming,” says Steve, then admits, “Not that I’ve been investigating very closely. I assaulted an officer and went AWOL, so I’m kind of a wanted man.”

“Actually, you’re kind of a dead man,” says Clint, turning away from the computer to face him. “Officially, anyway.”

“What are you talking about?” asks Steve.

“I looked you up,” says Clint. “You and every other name I could remember, before my agency caught on and burned me.” He laughs bitterly. “The official line is that you died during the experiment. That’s the official line on a lot of people, actually, but I’d guess that’s about forty percent cover-ups, thirty percent people faking their own deaths — like me — and thirty percent actual deaths.”

But Steve is still stuck on the first thing Clint said: _I looked you up._

“Who else did you look up?” he asks eagerly. “Bucky Barnes? Peggy Carter? Tim Dugan, Gabe Jones, Jim Mor—”

“Slow down,” says Clint. “I mostly looked up people _I_ knew. Only started on historical figures toward the end, and I never memorized the Howling Commando member roster. I did try Carter, but I only had access to the American list, so no dice. Best-case scenario, though, she was a projection.”

“What makes you say that?” Steve asks warily.

“Well, if she was real, she probably got plugged in around the same time as you,” says Clint. “And she was still in there when I got out.”

“And when was that?” Steve asks. “I mean, how far did the Dream go? When did they end it?”

“Now,” says Clint quietly.

There’s a very pregnant pause.

“You mean Peggy was in there for eighty years?” Steve is horrified.

“Like I said, best-case, she was a projection,” says Clint.

“And worst-case?” Steve forces himself to ask, because he’s never believed Peggy was anything other than one hundred percent her own person.

“Either she was in on it, or she wasn’t and now her head is screwed to hell,” says Clint. “Or she was in on it _and_ her head is screwed to hell.”

He goes back to tapping on his keyboard while Steve processes this.

“I’m not just looking for her,” he says finally. He pauses. Takes a breath. Braces himself. “Did you look up Bucky Barnes?”

“No, sorry,” says Clint, without bothering to look at him. “You were just about the last person I got to before I got locked out. I spent most of the time trying to find my partner, but obviously that didn’t work out.”

“I’m sorry,” says Steve.

“Of course,” Clint continues, sounding frustrated, “it’d help if I knew what name she’s using.”

Steve frowns. “You think the problem is she’s using an alias out here?”

“We’re all using aliases out here,” says Clint. “The problem is she was using an alias _in there_. The problem is I never knew her real name. Hell, I don’t even know if _she_ knew her real name. I don’t even know if she _had_ a real name. I don’t even know if she was fucking real!”

“Well, I get that,” says Steve quietly.

Clint drops his face into his hands.

“Yeah,” he mutters.

“Have you plugged into a PASIV since the experiment?” Steve asks.

Clint’s head snaps up.

“Of course not,” he says, looking startled. “I don’t need my head screwed any more than it’s already been. Why?”

“Because,” says Steve, “that’s how I knew Bucky was real.”

\-----

Here is the truth: Steve never wonders if Peggy was a projection. For all that she was perfect for him — and she _was_ perfect for him, in so many ways — she hadn’t felt intrinsically woven into the tapestry of his Dream life the way Bucky had.

Here is the truth: Nothing happened between Steve and Bucky in the Dream. Steve had never let anything happen, had never wanted anything to happen, had never known it was something he _could_ want.

Here is the truth: Projection or not, Steve would never burn his life down for anyone else.

\-----

“I don’t like this,” says Clint, watching suspiciously as Steve slides the needle into his arm. “What if we get trapped in there again?”

“We won’t,” says Steve, putting a needle into his own arm. “There’s a timer. Five minutes out here, an hour in there. Five minutes to find out the truth.”

“How do you know I’ll project her?” Clint asks.

“I don’t,” Steve admits, and starts the PASIV.

He opens his eyes in a bar. He doesn’t recognize it — they’re in Clint’s subconscious — but he can tell it’s a dive: the music is crap, the floor is sticky, the beer in his hand is too warm.

“Grab a cue,” Clint calls from a pool table in the back. He’s already chalking his.

Steve goes to him, pulling a cue off the wall on his way.

“Your break,” he tells Clint.

“If you never want a turn…” Clint’s grin is cocky. He lines up the shot, pulls back the cue, and—

A manicured hand drops onto the balls, disrupting their perfect triangle.

“Don’t you know it’s rude to start before a lady, Barton?”

The cue falls from Clint’s hand. Very slowly, he lifts his head. He looks absolutely shattered.

“Natasha,” he breathes.

Natasha — or at least Clint’s projection of her — reminds Steve of Peggy: competent, confident, dangerous. She’s harder, though, than Steve remembers Peggy, which surprises him. He expected Clint’s projection to soften her, the way his softens Bucky.

Natasha’s playful smile disappears.

“I’m here, Clint,” she whispers.

Clint shuts his eyes and shakes his head as if trying to clear it.

“You’re not real,” he says.

“Of course I am,” says Natasha. “I’m just as real in here as I was in there.”

“You’re not her,” says Clint, but Steve hears a note of uncertainty.

“Trying to replace me?” Bucky’s breath is warm against Steve’s ear. His arm slides across Steve’s shoulders and Steve turns into the touch, arm automatically settling around Bucky’s waist.

“Yes,” he admits. “With the genuine article.”

Bucky snorts. “In your dreams, pal.”

“No,” says Steve. “Just the opposite.”

Clint turns to Steve, angry and agonized all at once. “Why did you do this to me?”

“Is it her?” Steve asks.

“I— it doesn’t feel like it.”

“Good.” Steve pulls away from Bucky and starts racking up the pool balls Natasha disturbed. “That means there’s hope. Now break. We’ve still got fifty-five minutes in here.”

“You want to play two-on-two?” Natasha asks.

“Sorry,” says Clint harshly. “Real boys only.”

Natasha shrugs. She goes to stand next to Bucky, and they both watch intently as Clint neatly sinks three balls at once.

“You’re manipulating the table,” Steve accuses, when Clint sinks the final ball without Steve ever getting a turn.

“If that’s what you have to tell yourself,” says Clint, grinning. “I warned you not to let me break.”

Steve breaks the next game, and it’s slightly more even. In the middle of the fourth game, Natasha takes Bucky’s hand and leads him to the marginally less cluttered area that might be considered a dance floor.

Clint never looks up from the pool table, sinking ball after ball, but Steve can’t stop watching Natasha and Bucky, Clint’s consciousness and his entwined, dancing until the music stops and Steve opens his eyes in Clint’s safe house.

\-----

Clint turns out to be an invaluable ally, and not just because he’s the first person Steve’s met who understands what happened in the Dream. It still takes a few months, but Clint’s training and experience as a spy — both in real life and in the Dream — enables them to get out of the country, something Steve had started to give up on.

In London they meet up with a couple of Clint’s contacts from before the experiment.

“Russia’s a dead end,” Bobbi tells them. “We haven’t found anything connecting them to this experiment. I’m so sorry, Clint,” she adds, reaching out to take his hand, but Clint withdraws it.

“It’s fine,” he says, his tone and expression carefully blank. “I appreciate you looking.”

“We did get a lead in Cardiff,” says Hunter, passing a file to Clint. “Nothing substantial, but enough to warrant a second look.”

Clint doesn’t even open the file.

“I appreciate it,” he says again. “I know this could get you in trouble.”

“That doesn’t matter,” says Bobbi.

“Trouble’s half the fun,” Hunter adds, shrugging.

Bobbi pulls Steve aside before they leave.

“What exactly happened in there?” she asks. “Clint’s lost people before. In our line of work, it’s inevitable. But he’s never taken it like this.”

“Yeah, but with those people there were bodies, witnesses, confirmation, right?” says Steve. “Now there’s just uncertainty. He doesn’t know if she’s dead or alive or ever even existed in the first place. That’s the worst part of this whole screwed up thing.”

Bobbi’s expression softens.

“You lost someone too,” she says, more statement than question, and Steve feels his mouth twist in the wry parody of a smile.

“I lost everyone.”

\-----

The lead in Cardiff is a nineteen-year-old American woman who, according to the file, is officially missing and presumed dead — or at least matches the photo of an Air Force cadet who’s officially missing and presumed dead.

“Apparently she turned up here three days after the experiment,” Clint tells Steve on the train. He irritably tosses him the extremely thin file. “Damn thing is useless. Even her name’s been redacted. Hunter’s sloppy, but Bobbi is usually better than this.”

Steve flips the folder open and thumbs through it. It _is_ pretty useless: just a heavily redacted one-page personnel summary that tells him she was in her second year at the Air Force Academy in Colorado, that she disappeared from the Academy two days after Steve woke up, and almost nothing else; an official military headshot; a couple surveillance photos of her walking around Cardiff (Steve’s not even sure it’s the same woman); and an incomplete summary of her movements over two days that includes a brief visit to a dream den.

“We’re not going to get anything from her,” Steve says, passing the file back. “If she was part of it, she was a subject like us, not one of the architects.”

“Agreed,” says Clint. “Still, if she was good enough to escape the country so quickly, she might be good enough to know something. Worth talking to, anyway.”

“Not like we have any other leads,” Steve agrees.

“We’ll tail her for a few days, try to get a bead on her routine, then make the approach,” says Clint. “Ideally around a dream den, but we’ll have to see how realistic that is.” He flips the file open and looks at her headshot again. “Does she look, I don’t know, familiar to you?”

Steve takes the photo and studies it for a few moments. He’s definitely never seen the woman before, in the Dream or in real life.

“No,” he says. “But maybe you met her in there?”

“Maybe,” says Clint, sounding unconvinced. He frowns at the photo again, but then shrugs. “Or she just looks like someone on tv.”

The file doesn’t contain enough information for them to easily locate their mark, so they stake out the dream den she previously visited for lack of a better option, and on the fifth day she finally appears, a few minutes before Clint’s scheduled to relieve Steve from his surveillance shift. She looks younger in person, barely more than a girl, but she carries herself with a surety that’s unmistakable even from a distance.

“Finally some good news,” says Clint when Steve tells him, which Steve thinks is being a bit optimistic. “I’ll tail her when she— shit, never mind, let’s go.”

Steve follows Clint’s gaze across the street, where the girl has reemerged from the antique shop that fronts the dream den.

“She can’t be done already,” he mutters.

“Must not have gone under,” says Clint. “Come on.”

They follow the girl down the street, careful to keep half a block behind. She pauses at the bus stop for a few seconds, but seems to think better of it and continues around the corner instead. Steve keeps an eye out for any random turns or circular routes that would indicate she’s trying to shake them, but she doesn’t appear to notice them at all. They’ve followed her for nearly a mile when she abruptly turns into an alley. Clint hesitates for a moment before slipping after her, Steve right behind him.

The alley is a dead-end.

And completely deserted.

Clint turns back to Steve, frowning.

“Where did she—?” Steve starts, but Clint’s expression shifts to surprise before settling into something like resignation.

“Shit,” he says flatly, and Steve turns.

The girl is standing in the mouth of the alley, cutting off their only escape route, and she has a gun pointed directly at Steve’s chest.

“You have ten seconds to tell me who you are and why you’re following me,” she says, deadly calm. “Then I start taking out kneecaps.”

The terrifying thing is Steve absolutely believes her. Her hand is steady and her stance is perfect. This isn’t the first time she’s pointed a gun at someone, and it won’t be the first time she’s shot anyone either.

“We just want to talk,” says Clint, as Steve slowly raises his hands in surrender. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

The girl snorts. “You can try, kid.”

“_Kid_?” Clint actually sounds amused. Steve winces.

“I’m older than I look,” says the girl without a trace of humor, and that seals it.

“How much older?” asks Steve softly. “How long were you under?”

Her face is too obscured in shadow to tell if her expression changes, and her voice is carefully blank when she says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think you do,” says Steve, taking a tentative step forward.

The girl tenses for a moment, but then she relaxes slightly, frowning.

“Steve?”

Based on Steve’s experience with Clint, her recognition isn’t totally surprising, but her tone brings him up short. It’s _familiar_, like they’re long-lost friends, not like he’s just a bolded name and three-quarter profile she skimmed over in a dry history textbook.

Yet standing here face-to-face, Steve is more certain than ever that he doesn’t know her.

“Yeah,” he says. “Captain America.”

The girl shakes her head.

“No,” she says, lowering the gun. “_Steve_. Peggy’s Steve.”

A wave of dizziness washes over him.

“You know Peggy?” he breathes, and the girl laughs, warm and relieved.

“Know her? Honey, I’m her wife.”


	2. Chapter 2

Angie — Peggy’s _wife_, Steve’s still reeling from that one — takes them on a very circuitous route toward the outskirts of the city. Clint keeps stumbling as he all but gawks at her, struggling (and failing) to keep the composure Steve has never before seen him without in the waking world.

“I’m such a big fan, ma’am,” he tells her as they take another turn, and immediately flushes. “That is, I admire your— um, your work, what you and Director Carter—”

“You knew?” Steve interrupts.

“Her name was redacted,” says Clint defensively.

“That Peggy had a wife,” Steve clarifies.

“It was a pretty open secret around SHIELD,” says Clint, shrugging.

“And you didn’t think to mention it?”

“Until ten minutes ago we didn’t even know if she was real,” says Clint. “Her personal life didn’t exactly seem relevant.”

“Her personal life can hear you,” Angie snaps. “Keep your voices down. The last thing we need is to get made because you idiots can’t stop blabbing our identities all over the streets.”

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am,” Clint mumbles.

Angie’s lips twitch slightly.

“I’ve missed that,” she confesses.

“Missed what?” Steve asks.

“Respect,” says Angie simply.

It’s another forty minutes before they finally arrive at Angie and Peggy’s ground floor townhouse flat in the middle of a quiet, unremarkable street.

“Wait in the hall while I explain,” Angie tells them as she unlocks the door. “Pegs, it’s me!” she calls out as soon they’re safely inside.

“Darling?” Peggy’s warm, melodious voice floats into the hall. “You’re late. Were you followed?”

“For a bit,” Angie says, disappearing through the first doorway off the hall. Steve can’t stop himself from edging along behind her. He catches a glimpse of the two of them pulling apart from a brief kiss, but Angie is still blocking Peggy’s face. “But it’s all right, hon. They’re friendly.”

“They?”

“Yeah, a guy who came up through the Academy, Clint,” says Angie, “and—”

“Steve!” Peggy gasps.

Steve can’t stop a small smile, despite Angie’s pointed glare. Peggy looks just like he remembers, except her hair is straighter and her face hasn’t quite lost the roundness of youth.

“Hey, Peggy,” he says softly.

Peggy pushes past Angie and pulls him close. He closes his eyes and rests his cheek on her hair, allowing himself a moment to savor the almost stifling comfort of her familiarity after so many months of isolation.

“You’re alive,” Peggy whispers as she pulls back, studying his face. “It’s been so long.”

“Three months out here,” says Steve. “How long were you in there?”

“Seventy-six years,” says Peggy matter-of-factly.

“_What_?” Steve is horrified. It hits him that out here she can’t be more than nineteen.

“Yes, I lived quite a life,” she says with a small laugh. “Made it all the way to ninety-four, when they initiated the final kick.”

“I got out about sixteen hours before her,” says Angie. “Sixteen years from her perspective.”

“That must have been horrible,” says Steve, trying very hard _not_ to imagine living with the constant ache of grief for well over a decade.

“It doesn’t matter now,” says Peggy. She takes Angie’s hand, smiling softly. “Not when we’ve been given a second chance.”

“Yeah, about that,” Clint breaks in from behind Steve.

“Honey, this is Clint Barton,” says Angie, frowning at him. “Former SHIELD agent.”

“Wonderful to meet you, Agent Barton,” says Peggy, extending her hand.

“It’s an honor, ma’am, really,” says Clint, shaking it fervently. “But I have to ask: How did you find each other so quickly?” He sounds a little angry. Steve can relate.

“Advantage of being with a spy,” says Angie with a small shrug. “We had to have protocols in case things ever went south. As soon as I realized what happened, I escaped the facility and followed the last protocol we’d agreed on in the Dream, and fortunately, so did Pegs.” She frowns. “You didn’t have something like that with your partner?”

“Of course I did!” Clint snaps. “But none of our safe houses exist out here, and besides, they were all set up by SHIELD.”

“You didn’t have a protocol if SHIELD was compromised? If all your safe houses got burned?” Angie rolls her eyes. “Kids! What did they even teach you at that fancy academy?”

“Didn’t you help found that fancy academy?” Clint retorts.

“This isn’t helpful,” says Steve firmly. He turns to Peggy. “Have you heard about any of the others? The Commandos? Howard?”

Peggy’s face falls. “You didn’t hear.”

“What?” Steve asks, his chest constricting.

“Howard had quite the life in there. I don’t mean his company, though of course it flourished. But he had a wife, Maria, and a son.” Peggy smiles sadly. “I knew them. They were amazing. Just what Howard needed.”

“They were projections,” Steve surmises, horrified.

Peggy’s mouth twists slightly.

“Howard and Maria died in a car crash in the early nineties,” she continues. “I got out less than twenty-four hours after him but it was already too late. It took him just a few hours to hack the database of Dream subjects. From what I’ve heard, when he realized Maria was a projection, he went crazy. Tried to plug himself into the Dream again. But it— it went wrong.” Peggy’s voice breaks. “He was dead even before Angie woke up.”

Steve feels sick.

“I told them,” he mutters. “I _told_ them they were destroying lives.” He shakes his head. “What about the others? Was anyone else a— a projection?” He hesitates. “What about Bucky?”

“Barnes?” Angie chimes in. “He _definitely_ wasn’t a projection.”

“Angie!” says Peggy sharply, but the damage is already done.

“What do you mean?” asks Steve warily. “How are you so sure?”

“Barnes was down in Fort Hood,” says Angie, as if that explains everything, and apparently it explains something to Clint, because he inhales sharply.

“And?” Steve turns to Clint, but Clint is studiously avoiding his eyes.

“Hood was kind of a mess,” he mumbles.

Steve glances at Peggy. Her eyes are full of pity, and he knows that whatever she’s about to tell him, he absolutely does not want to hear it.

“Bucky was one of the first ones in the whole experiment to wake up,” says Peggy softly. “Apparently he realized what happened before they could even get to him. He somehow took over the entire lab and demanded to know where people he knew in the Dream were.”

“We’re talking full-blown hostage situation,” Angie adds. “It was nuts.”

_Oh god._ Steve’s eyes are burning. He knows exactly who Bucky was trying to find.

“Did he— is he—?” He can’t finish the question.

“The records were incomplete,” says Angie. “They were halfway through scrubbing the files when we got to them, and the next time we got in officially none of that happened at all, since it doesn’t exactly put the big-wigs at Hood in a great light that their little experiment totally melted down. So who knows, but…” She bites her lip, but Steve doesn’t need her to complete the thought.

Hostages, multi-million-dollar experiment, unpredictable soldier…

“Look, Steve,” says Peggy, pulling him out of this spiral, “we’ll help you find him, or at least find out what happened to him.”

“No.” Steve shakes his head. “Thank you, Peggy, really, but I can’t let you do that. You and Angie have a life together. I can’t let you risk that for me.”

“I don’t think it’s up to you,” says Angie, folding her arms across her chest. “You may have been Captain America in dreamland, but that doesn’t mean we take orders from you.”

Steve glances at Peggy, who’s smiling at Angie with open affection and obvious pride.

“I’m sorry, Steve,” she says. “It seems I have a type.”

Steve smiles too.

“Seems so,” he says. “All right, then, ladies. Where do we start?”

\-----

“So your girl got a girl,” says Bucky with a grin. “Tough break, man.”

“I’m happy for her,” says Steve honestly. Peggy’s never been the one he needs to find.

Bucky — the projection of Bucky — gives him a wry smile.

“You don’t sound very happy, pal.”

“I _am_ happy for her,” Steve insists. “For both of them. It’s just… hard watching them together and knowing how quickly they found each other when…”

“When…?”

“When I’m not any closer to being with you.”

“You _are_ with me,” says Bucky fervently; he takes Steve’s hand in both of his. “You don’t have to leave. You don’t have to wake up. You can go deeper. You can stay.”

He makes the same argument every time Steve uses the PASIV, and oddly, it’s this more than anything else that reinforced Steve’s belief that the Bucky he knew in the experiment was real even before Peggy and Angie confirmed it. The Bucky Steve remembers would never have dreamed of suggesting anything that might not have been in Steve’s best interest — especially not for a reason as trifling as Bucky’s own wants or needs.

“I can’t,” says Steve, as he does every time. “If there’s even the slightest possibility the real you is still out there, I have to go back. I have to find him.”

Bucky releases his hand. “You know the chances are—”

“Yeah,” says Steve, without meeting his eyes. “I know. I still have to try.”

“You never did know when to quit.” Bucky smiles that familiar half-smile he started wearing after the war started — after Steve started trying to enlist.

Only now does Steve see the sadness underneath it.

_It’s a projection. It’s what I’m projecting,_ he tries to tell himself, but he knows it’s not true. Bucky had only ever hidden his true feelings just under the surface, waiting for Steve to notice them.

Waiting for Steve to stop ignoring them.

_I’m sorry,_ he wants to say. _I should have sent you home when I had the chance. I could have woken up before you, could have found you before—_

But Bucky would never have let Steve wake up before him. Bucky would have done everything in his power to keep Steve alive.

And if he couldn’t, if he failed, he would have died with him or right after; would have woken up alone at Hood long before Steve could have reached him; would have taken the base hostage trying to find—

It was always going to end the same way, Steve realizes. There was never a scenario where they got to be together.

Where they got to be happy.

He’s so _tired_.

“Quitting’s not in my vocabulary,” he tells the projection. “Not when it comes to you. Not anymore.”

Bucky gives a noncommittal hum.

“I’m not giving up on you,” Steve insists. “I mean it.”

The projection gives him that half-smile again.

“I know you do,” he says softly.

Steve wonders if the real Bucky has ever been so certain.

\-----

Where they start is with Rose Roberts.

“_The_ Rose Roberts?” says Clint disbelievingly as soon as Peggy brings her up. “The woman who single-handedly foiled six different assassination attempts on you when you were director, and was instrumental in stopping at least a dozen more? Who led over fifty successful—”

“Yeah, Rose is great,” Angie cuts in. “She was at the Air Force Academy with me, but we were on different tracks and didn’t meet in the Dream until almost ten years in, so we didn’t recognize each other in there. Like me, she escaped the facility and faked her death. Unlike me, she stayed in America looking for other Dream subjects. Last we heard, she was tracking down Jason Wilkes.”

“_The_ Jason—”

“Yeah, man, we’re the founders of SHIELD,” says Angie impatiently, before Clint can finish the question and start reeling off Jason Wilkes’s accomplishments. “We know people. Chill.”

“Rose is due to check in with us in a few days,” says Peggy. “Hopefully she’s found Jason. If anyone can help us find out who was responsible for all this, it’ll be him.”

They spend the next two days holed up in the flat, where Peggy and Angie regale Steve and Clint with tales of their most daring feats and closest calls from their half-century of spying. It doesn’t take long for Clint to start asking for the real stories behind the legends he’d been told in training or on particularly dull missions, and Steve begins to feel like he missed a lot by waking so early (although of course he doesn’t say so).

On the third morning they gather around one of Angie’s laptops to receive Rose’s encrypted video call. Logically Steve knows Rose must be in her early twenties, but it still startles him when she pops up on the screen looking so very fresh-faced and _young_, after he’s gotten used to thinking of her as the terrifyingly competent, kickass forty-something from Peggy and Angie’s stories.

“Who are the beards?” she demands at once.

“Nice, Rose.” Angie’s reproving tone is undercut by her grin. “This is Clint, an agent from the nineties. And you might recognize Steve?”

“Peggy’s Steve?”

“The one and only.”

“Hi,” says Steve.

“It’s an honor to meet you, ma’am,” says Clint.

“Back atcha,” says Rose, with no sincerity.

“Rose, have you found Jason?” Peggy asks, leaning in front of Clint to get in frame.

“See for yourself.”

Rose pans to the left and a handsome man slides into view. Like Rose, he’s far younger than Steve’s been picturing, maybe twenty-three at most.

“Hi, Pegs. Ange.”

“Jason, thank goodness!” Peggy exclaims. “Are you all right?”

“That’s a relative term.” Jason shrugs. “I’m alive and sane, which is more than a lot of people can say.” His expression turns somber. “I heard about Howard. I’m so sorry, Pegs.”

“Yeah, me too,” says Peggy softly.

There’s a few moments of silence. Jason shakes his head slightly.

“Steve Rogers,” he says in a lighter tone. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Yeah, you and everybody else,” says Steve.

“And what’s your story, kid?” Jason adds, looking past Peggy.

“‘Kid’ again?” Clint complains. “I’m twenty-five! You know that technically makes me the oldest person here, right?”

“Aww, he’s cute!” says Rose. “Can we keep him?”

Angie laughs as Clint huffs indignantly.

“Clint’s been trying to track down his partner,” says Peggy, clearly fighting back her own smile.

“And so have I,” Steve adds.

“You mean Barnes?” says Jason. “Because I hate to tell you this, but that’s a longshot, man.”

“Barnes is a ghost,” chimes in Rose. “No records, no witnesses, nothing. After Hood he just… vanished.”

“Well somebody has to know something!” Steve snaps.

“Agreed,” says Peggy. “Which is why we need to find whoever was responsible for all this and get answers.”

“Or failing that, revenge,” Clint growls.

“Answers would be more helpful,” says Peggy, and Steve nods, though privately he thinks Clint isn’t entirely on the wrong track. “Jason, I’m sorry to ask, but can you—”

“Already on it,” says Jason, “but it’s slow going. The architects behind this worked hard to stay anonymous, and with good reason.”

“I can’t imagine anyone is too eager to take responsibility for such an unmitigated disaster,” Peggy agrees.

“Yeah, but it’s more than professional preservation,” says Jason. “We’re not the only subjects who are pissed, and we’re not the only ones who got extra decades’ worth of military and espionage training either.”

“Yeah, I’d be covering up my involvement too,” mutters Clint.

“Especially because someone _is_ going after them,” says Rose.

“Us,” says Steve grimly.

“No,” says Jason. “Someone else.”

Steve, Clint, Peggy, and Angie exchange confused looks.

“What makes you think that?” asks Peggy

“We already cracked two names on the list,” says Jason.

“That’s amazing!” Angie exclaims. “_You’re_ amazing!”

“Thanks, Ange,” says Rose, flashing a small smile, “but it’s useless. They’re dead.”

Angie and Peggy glance at each other.

“Both of them?” says Peggy slowly.

“Both of them,” Rose confirms.“One from heart failure, one in a boating accident.”

“That’s quite a coincidence,” says Angie.

“Exactly,” says Rose. “Not to mention a general who fits the target profile who was recently killed in a car crash. Someone’s on a revenge spree. And they’re very, very good at covering their tracks.”

“Which means if we want answers, we need to get to the targets before the killer does,” says Steve.

Jason nods. “And we’re already a step behind.”

\-----

Bucky starts to lean his cue against the wall even before the 8-ball drops into the designated corner pocket.

“You’re worried.”

“I’m not worried,” Steve lies — a ridiculous thing to do to an extension of his own subconscious, he knows, but lying to alleviate Bucky’s fretting is a reflex. He looks at the table so he doesn’t have to meet Bucky’s unwavering gaze. “Good game. Guess the next round’s on me.”

Bucky folds his arms across his chest and gives Steve a skeptical look, letting the silence stretch.

“Okay, yes, it’s a setback,” Steve finally snaps. “What do you want me to say?”

“Maybe it’s not,” says Bucky slowly.

“What the hell does that mean?” Steve demands. “I can’t question someone who’s dead.”

“Yeah, but if all the top dogs get wiped out…” Bucky lets the sentence hang.

“It’s not that simple,” says Steve finally.

“Isn’t it?” says Bucky. “No more looking over your shoulder. No more alias. Maybe _I_ would find _you_.”

“Buck—”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”

“Of course I have! But you’re— _he’s_ not looking. I’ve been declared dead, remember?”

Bucky steps closer, one hand reaching up to stroke Steve’s cheek.

“Didn’t stop you,” he whispers. “You really think it would stop me?”

“Bucky…” Steve breathes. He has to fight every instinct he has to keep from leaning into the touch, to stop himself tipping forward the few inches it would take to—

Bucky’s hand abruptly drops back to his side, his expression turning ugly.

“What’s _she_ doing here?”

“What?” Steve turns to follow Bucky’s gaze to—

“God_dammit_, Steve,” Peggy sighs.

“You’re not welcome here,” Bucky growls.

“Whoa, hey, Buck, that’s not—”

“Yes,” says Peggy over Steve’s sputtering, pulling a pistol from nowhere. “I know.”

“No, wait!” Steve starts to shout, but before he’s finished the protest he’s opening his eyes in Peggy and Angie’s guest bedroom.

“You absolute moron, Steve Rogers!” Peggy snarls the second her eyes fly open and she sits up. “Do you know how dangerous that is?”

“You don’t know anything about it,” Steve growls, yanking the needle out of his arm with far less care than Peggy does hers.

“I know every time you project him you risk falling into Limbo,” says Peggy. “I know if you’re not careful you’ll lose all ability to distinguish fantasy from reality.”

Steve gets to his feet, wiping roughly at the blood beading up in the crook of his elbow.

“You don’t know a damn thing!” he snaps. “You found Angie after three days! I’ve been looking for Bucky for three _months_!”

“That’s not an excuse!”

“I don’t need an excuse!”

“Do you even have a totem?”

“I’m not an idiot!” 

“You could have fooled me!” says Peggy acidly. “Falling in love with a projection—”

“He is _not_ a projection!”

“You know what I mean!”

“That’s not what I’m— I’ve never even kissed him! I barely touch him!”

“Steve, this is why Howard is _dead_!” Peggy bellows and Steve’s retort instantly dies on his lips. For a moment they just stare at each other, the horror of what was done to them — done to all of them — pressing in on them, inescapable and overwhelming.

Peggy looks away first, breaking the gaze to take a seat on the foot of the bed. Steve follows suit before his legs can give out. Peggy reaches out and takes his hand.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says softly, without looking at her. “I don’t— I didn’t think of it that way.”

“I know,” says Peggy. “And I know it’s not entirely the same. But Steve, keeping this door open…. What happens if—” her hand tightens around his— “if he didn’t make it?” Her voice is barely audible, but Steve feels like she’s still shouting.

“Then at least I’ll know,” he says finally. “And I’ll end it.”

“Will you?”

What Steve wants to say — what he _ought_ to say — is that of course he will. That the projection of Bucky is a poor substitute for the real thing. That he would rather move on, accept closure however painful, than spend an unconscious lifetime with a pale imitation of the man he loves.

But the very idea of not even projecting Bucky anymore — of never again seeing his smirk or hearing him affectionately call Steve an idiot — makes him want to snatch up the PASIV right now and run.

“If I don’t,” he says instead, “I guess you’ll have to find a way to make me.”

\-----

They have to support their operation somehow, so while Rose and Jason try to chase down more of the experiment’s architects, Steve, Clint, Peggy, and Angie start taking extraction jobs. Clint gathers intel on the marks and Steve designs the dreamscapes, but generally neither of them is required to actually go under, since Angie is an exceptional forger and Peggy’s extraction skills are unparalleled. On the rare occasions another person is needed, it’s always Clint, who hasn’t been purposefully projecting Natasha nearly every night for months and whom Peggy therefore actually trusts.

Steve doesn’t stop plugging into the PASIV in private, although he’s more careful now when and where he does it. He knows Peggy’s objections were perfectly reasonable — sensible, even — but he refuses to let go of Bucky until all hope is extinguished.

And even then…

The weeks melt away. Rose and Jason uncover half a dozen names attached to half a dozen dead officials in various countries.

“No signs of foul play,” Rose reports every time. “And yet… ”

And yet.

“Oh, um, Pegs, Ange,” Rose says three months later, after giving the usual report about another dead general, this time in France. “We, uh— we found Janet.”

Peggy takes Angie’s hand.

“She didn’t make it?” she says softly, and a bolt of righteous anger goes through Steve even though he only knows Janet from a handful of stories.

“No, she made it,” says Rose slowly. “She just… doesn’t remember.”

“What do you mean?” says Angie. “Which part?”

“Any of it,” says Rose. “Us. Hank. _Hope_, which is probably a blessing but…”

“That little girl was her whole world,” says Angie. “How could she forget her?”

“Are you sure it’s the same Janet?” asks Peggy. “Are you sure she was part of it?”

“Yes, and yes,” says Rose. “But it’s like she… I don’t know who did it or how, but somehow they just… wiped her.”

_ Wipe him._

The memory surfaces so suddenly Steve physically startles.

“They had a way to wipe people,” he says abruptly. “I heard him talking about it before I escaped. He wanted to wipe me.”

“Who?” says Peggy.

“The colonel at SLO.” Steve frowns, trying to remember. “Price? No. Pierce?”

“Alexander Pierce?” says Peggy sharply.

“I don’t know,” says Steve, shaking his head. “Maybe.”

“Wait,” says Jason. “Pierce was in charge? He wasn’t a subject?”

“What?” says Steve. “No, definitely not. He was awake for one thing.”

“But that’s…” Jason, Rose, Peggy, and Angie are all staring at each other, wide-eyed.

“_Shit_!” says Rose, so emphatically the laptop speaker pops.

“Does somebody want to tell me what’s going on?” says Steve.

“Alexander Pierce was a SHIELD protege,” says Angie. “We all mentored him at one point or another. When the Ghost took him out we were devastated.”

“The Ghost?”

“Well obviously he wasn’t really a ghost,” says Angie. “Knowing what we know now, it actually makes perfect sense, but obviously in there…. He was this rogue assassin who first showed up in the fifties and then would randomly pop up over the next sixty years. Always the same guy, always the same gear. And he really seemed to hate SHIELD.”

“Alex was killed just after Howard and Maria died,” says Peggy. “It was a tough time. Losing the three of them so close together…. I’d been preparing Alex to take over as director. He was perfect for it. His instincts were always spot on.” Her lips quirk upwards, but there’s no humor or warmth in her small smile. “Practically prescient.”

“Because he was aware,” says Rose flatly.

“Yes,” says Peggy; her voice is ice cold.

“Not necessarily,” Steve feels compelled to point out. “We don’t know it was the same Pierce. He could be a son or a brother. He could be no relation at all.”

“He could be,” says Peggy. “But I don’t think so. It explains everything about him, Steve. It wasn’t talent or skill. Alex knew it was a dream. He knew the plans. He knew the future.”

“We’ll look into it,” says Jason. “To be sure.”

“Good,” says Peggy. “Because I have a lot of questions for Alexander Pierce.”

She isn’t the only one.

\-----

Pierce, it transpires, has only recently returned to the Pentagon after a six-month extended leave.

“Could be he was recovering from the mindscrew of the Dream,” says Rose when she and Jason call to report in a few days later. “But I think he was lying low. We couldn’t find anything about where he went. He basically disappeared.”

“So why come back now?” asks Clint. “He has to know someone’s after the architects. Why turn himself into a target?”

“Could be someone got on his trail,” says Rose, shrugging. “The Pentagon’s more secure than some small town or suburb.”

“Or it’s just his trademark mix of humility and arrogance,” says Angie. “He probably thinks he’s not important enough to be a target, while also believing he’s invincible if he is.”

“That sounds like Alex,” Peggy agrees wryly. “But he’s _not_ invincible, the Pentagon isn’t impenetrable, and he doesn’t live there even if it were. So how are we going to do this?”

Jason and Rose look at each other, smiling.

“We have a few ideas.”

\-----

“I still can’t believe you grabbed him in the Trader Joe’s parking lot on a _Saturday_ and it _worked_,” says Angie three weeks later, as she, Steve, Rose, and Jason tighten the zip ties now binding Pierce to a simple metal chair in the middle of the deserted warehouse they’ve secured for his interrogation — which, unfortunately, has to be conventional, since Pierce undoubtedly has extensive subconscious security training.

Peggy and Clint are still in Cardiff. Personally, Steve would feel a lot better if Angie were safely there too, but he’s at least grateful she (miraculously, as far as he can tell) managed to convince Peggy to stay behind once they’d concluded dream-share extraction was unworkable.

“What can I say?” says Rose with a grin. “We’re just that good.”

“Timing is everything,” Jason adds. He looks at his watch. “Speaking of which, he should be waking up soon. We’ll leave you to it.”

They’ve agreed that the fewer of them Pierce knows about, the better.

“Thank you both,” says Steve. “More than you can know.”

“It’s our pleasure,” says Jason.

“Watch out for cameras!” Angie calls as Jason and Rose head for the door. The two of them are going to search Pierce’s apartment while Steve and Angie deal with the man himself.

“Who are you talking to?” tsks Rose, but she sounds more amused than indignant.

Pierce comes to slowly. He blinks a few times in the dim light of the warehouse, his arms and legs straining a little against the zip ties. Then his eyes focus on Angie and a lazy smile spreads across his face.

“Deputy Director Martinelli,” he says, apparently not the least bit concerned by the gun she’s aiming at him. “You’re looking younger than ever.”

“You’re not.” Angie’s voice is hard.

“Yes, I’ve been on this plane of consciousness quite a bit longer than you, I’m afraid,” says Pierce lightly. He looks about, his eyes landing briefly on Steve and the gun in his hand. “I see you’ve made friends with Sergeant Rogers. Or I suppose you’d know him as Captain Rogers. But where is the lovely Director Carter?”

“Keep her name out of your treacherous mouth!” Angie snarls.

Pierce’s face ripples with some unreadable emotion.

“I’m truly sorry if the reports are true,” he says softly, and if Steve didn’t know better he’d think he actually meant it.

“I don’t need condolences from a traitor,” says Angie coldly. “That’s not why we’re here. You’re going to tell us everything you know about this experiment. Names, dates, locations, equipment, _everything_.”

“Am I?” The lazy smile has reappeared.

“You do not want to test me, Alex.”

Pierce’s face goes hard.

“I’m very aware, _ma’am_,” he says. “I know all your dirty little secrets, remember? Yours and Carter’s. But you see there are bigger—”

“Stop posturing,” Steve snaps, growing impatient. “Are you gonna answer her or not?”

“The question isn’t _will_ I but _can_ I,” says Pierce. “I’m not quite as important as it seems you’d like me to be.”

“I don’t give a shit about your importance,” says Steve. “I don’t even give a shit about your experiment. See, Angie may want to know everything, but I only have one question for you: What happened to James Buchanan Barnes?”

“Of course.” Pierce sounds oddly exasperated. “I should have guessed that’s what this was really about. Rogers and Barnes, Barnes and Rogers. Doesn’t matter if you’re in there or out here, nothing else even exists for you, does it?”

Steve glances at Angie. Her expression is hard, but he knows her well enough by now to see the slight downward twitch of her eyebrows that means she’s as confused as he is.

Pierce gives a low chuckle. “Christ, you really don’t have a clue, do you, Rogers?”

Steve just readjusts his grip on the gun.

“Didn’t you ever wonder how you and Barnes became so intertwined? How you could be together from the beginning internally when you’d never so much as laid eyes on each other externally?”

“Nice try,” says Steve. “I already know he wasn’t a projection.”

“Yes,” says Pierce slowly, as if Steve is being unforgivably dense, “but _how_? You know it’s true, but _how_ could it be true?”

“That’s what we’re asking you,” Angie growls. “_Talk_.”

Pierce settles back in his chair — in as far as he can settle back with his arms tied — looking unnervingly relaxed for a man with two weapons trained on him.

“Global dream-sharing is incredibly complex,” he begins. “Thousands of moving parts, and if anyone notices something’s off when they shouldn’t, the whole thing could collapse. So we had to lay some groundwork.

“We paired unrelated subjects from different regions and put them under together, along with an inceptor to weave together a backstory.”

“Inception’s not possible,” says Angie at once. “That’s Dream-Share 101.”

“I defer to your expertise, of course, ma’am,” says Pierce mockingly. “Nevertheless, each subject pair was put under together half a dozen times before the final Dream.”

Steve frowns. “I don’t remember being put under before the Dream.”

“By design,” says Pierce, impatience creeping into his voice again. “After each trial run, you’d be debriefed to ensure the backstory was taking. Then you’d drink something the chemists whipped up and sleep normally. When you woke up, your conscious mind wouldn’t remember going under, but your subconscious would and would build on the memory the next time.”

“And is that what you were planning to do when it was all over?” Steve demands angrily. “Gather your data and then wipe us all?”

“Ideally, no,” says Pierce. “We’d want to follow up with our subjects, of course. But those who struggled to come back to reality—”

“Like Janet van Dyne and Howard Stark?” Angie’s voice is shaking.

Pierce gives a very small grimace, only the second trace of genuine emotion he’s betrayed.

“I liked Stark. What happened to him was unfortunate.”

“It was murder!”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Pierce snaps. “It was at worst involuntary manslaughter. But we’re digressing. Do you want to know about Barnes or not?”

“No, I got it,” says Steve flatly. “You incepted us to care about each other. But if you think that makes any dif—”

“That,” interrupts Pierce, “is exactly what we _didn’t_ do.”

Steve’s mind grinds to a halt.

“What?”

“We wanted to establish connections,” says Pierce. “Make sure our subjects were interacting with each other and not just projections. So our pairings would be neighbors, coworkers, classmates. How those relationships developed in the final Dream was up to the subjects, but they weren’t meant to be more than surface-level at the beginning.

“You and Barnes were supposed to just be neighbors. But something happened the first time you went under together. That childhood best friend bullshit? That wasn’t us. In fact, we tried to stamp it out. We paired you both with other subjects, but the inceptions wouldn’t take. I don’t know what was more irritating: you giving us hope another pairing had taken until we debriefed you, or Barnes recognizing the dream and shooting the inceptor every time we tried to put him with someone else.”

“So why didn’t you just kick them out of the experiment?” Angie asks.

“That would have been the intelligent thing to do,” says Pierce, inclining his head. “Some argued for it. But it was too fascinating a case study: Two people who had never met but whose subconsciouses melded so thoroughly they wouldn’t accept the reality of the Dream without each other. It had never been seen before. And while the results were messy, they _were_ fascinating.” 

“You’re talking about people’s lives,” Steve growls. “_My_ life.”

“I’m talking about your _dreams_,” Pierce corrects. “Anyway, then some genius decided to see what would happen if we separated you _in_ the Dream, so they arranged to have Barnes drafted.”

“Bucky wasn’t—” Steve breaks off. Of course. He should have seen it. It hadn’t ever made sense: Bucky had been so adamant about staying out of the war right up until…

_ Buck, why didn’t you tell me?_

“But that didn’t work,” he snarls, his anger amplified by guilt. “I got back to him. So then you had him killed.”

“Hell no!” For the first time, Pierce looks surprised. “If we’d planned to have Barnes killed, we’d have been better prepared when he woke up.”

“Which brings us to the original question,” says Steve. “What happened to James Buchanan Barnes?”

“What do you think, Rogers?” Pierce asks, calmer and more inscrutable than ever. “You’re a military man. What would be done to a rogue, unpredictable soldier with hostages?”

Steve shakes his head, his mind defensively shying away from the obvious answer.

“I’m done playing games,” he growls. “Just tell me or—”

“He’s dead,” says Pierce harshly. “Sniped.”

Steve’s vision blurs.

“You’re lying,” he whispers. The gun is shaking.

“Whatever you have to tell yourself,” says Pierce.

“Steve,” says Angie quietly. “Steve, he—” she gives him an unbearably pitying look when he turns to her — “he doesn’t have any reason to lie.”

“She’s right,” says Pierce.

“Shut the fuck up!” Angie snaps. She looks back at Steve. “Steve…”

“I know,” says Steve tonelessly. He lowers the gun. “I know.”

“And that’s about as much useful information as I can give you,” Pierce cuts in. “So what now, kids? Going to kill me?”

“It’s no more than you deserve,” says Angie coldly.

“No,” says Steve. “You’re right, it’s what he deserves,” he adds, when Angie throws him a questioning look. “But killing Pierce… it won’t bring him back. It won’t bring any of them back.”

He turns his back on Pierce, holstering his gun.

“Steve,” Angie growls at his retreating back. “Steve, that’s so fucking _stupid_.”

“Stupid, yeah,” Steve agrees, an involuntary smile tugging at his lips. “No better way to honor Bucky’s memory than that.”

“Steve!”

“I wouldn’t be too worried, Angie,” Steve tosses over his shoulder. “Someone’s killing off architects, remember? And it doesn’t seem like they’re stopping to ask questions.”

He takes just a moment to relish the horror flooding Pierce’s eyes before throwing open the warehouse door and stepping back into the sun.


	3. Chapter 3

“What’s wrong?” says Bucky the second Steve opens his eyes in their apartment. “And don’t try to tell me it’s nothing.”

For a moment Steve just looks at him. He wants to cry. He wants to cling to him. He wants to say, _Please don’t let me go. I’m so tired. I’ve been looking for you for so long. Please don’t leave me alone again. I need you. I never knew how much._

He wants, more than anything, for this to be real.

“You’re dead,” he says flatly.

“So does that mean you’re here to stay?” Bucky — the projection of Bucky — reaches for him, but Steve draws back.

“I came to say goodbye.”

The projection’s soft smile vanishes. “What are you talking about?”

“I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep projecting you. I— I have to move on.” He can’t look the projection in the eye.

“What the hell does that mean?” says the projection — Bucky — angrily. “Move on from what? I’m _right here_, Steve!”

“But you’re not real,” Steve whispers, even as his resolve begins to waver.

“I can be,” says Bucky. He steps forward and takes Steve’s face in his hands. “I can be as real as you want me to be.”

Steve’s eyes flutter closed as Bucky leans in…

— and then fly open as he jerks back at the last moment.

“No!” he says frantically, backing away, his left hand fumbling for the dog tags. If he kisses the projection, it becomes Bucky. If he kisses him, he’ll never be able to bring himself to leave. “No. You’re not him.”

He feels the sudden weight of a gun against his thigh. Slowly, he pulls it from the holster, his eyes never leaving Bucky’s face. It’s the last time he’ll ever see it. He clicks off the safety.

“You’re not him,” he repeats, more firmly. God, he doesn’t even have a picture. He brings the gun to his temple.

“Steve, don’t do this.” Bucky is shaking his head, his eyes pleading, and dammit, this isn’t how Steve wants to remember him!

“Goodbye, Buck.”

The last thing he sees is Bucky reaching for him as he pulls the trigger.

\-----

He can’t stay in the States, but he doesn’t go back to Cardiff. He heads to Amsterdam with a new alias — Grant Buchanan — hooks up with a couple contacts from the jobs he pulled in the U.K., and starts freelancing. He can’t go under, of course, but he has plenty of other skills to make up for it.

He bounces around the globe — Tokyo, Dubai, Paris, Cape Town, Melbourne, Rio, Beijing, Moscow — never staying in one place long enough to make more than surface-level connections.

A few days after D.C. he gets an encrypted message on his new burner.

_Pierce is dead. No signs of foul play. Thought you’d want to know. -P_

He tosses the phone in the next trash can he passes.

He didn’t.

\-----

Afterward, he’d had to sort through Bucky’s personal effects. That had been the worst part. Not having to somehow finish the mission; not having to make the report; not having to face it all stone cold sober.

No, the very worst part had been seeing Bucky’s life condensed into a single backpack.

A backpack filled mainly with military-issued items.

He’d nearly emptied it entirely of uniforms and supplies when he found it, tucked away at the very bottom: a pocket edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets Bucky’s mother had given him when he graduated. It looked well-worn, though Steve couldn’t recall ever seeing Bucky read it. He began to flip through it and a few papers fell from the open pages onto the cot. He abandoned the book to retrieve them automatically.

There were two photographs: a rather formal-looking one of Bucky’s parents; and a more relaxed snap of Bucky and Steve at their graduation, Bucky’s arm flung casually across Steve’s shoulder as they both smiled at the camera.

There was an identical photo at the bottom of Steve’s own pack. He swallowed hard around the sudden lump in his throat.

Then he noticed the third item that had fallen onto the cot: a piece of sketch paper, folded neatly into fourths. He opened it carefully — the paper had been folded and refolded so many times it was nearly worn through — and then froze, stunned.

It was a horrible, half-finished sketch that Steve didn’t even remember drawing. He must have been assigned a self-portrait, because the face on the right was clearly meant to be him, even if the eyes were the only feature with any detail and the rough outline of the nose was wrong.

But Steve had always found self-portraiture awkward, an odd mix of ego-stroking and self-flagellation, and so he’d always begun every self-portrait with a drawing of Bucky. After all, art was about beauty, and Bucky was the most beautiful person Steve knew — not that he was always adept at rendering that beauty.

On the left side of the paper was one of the worst sketches of Bucky’s face Steve thought he’d ever drawn. The jawline wasn’t sharp enough, the nose far too small, the mouth far too big. The eyes were exactly the same size, which was wrong for the perspective and made the right eye seem slightly too large in a way that was rather unsettling. Nonetheless, it was clear he and the half-finished Steve were looking — or at least meant to be looking — at each other, soft smiles on both their faces.

Though Steve was sure it hadn’t been his intention, the entire effect was rather sinister.

And yet Bucky had not only kept the damn thing, he had looked at it. Looked at it fairly often, if the delicate state of the creases was anything to go by. Looked at it and wanted to keep looking at it so much he’d brought it with him to a war on a whole other damn continent.

Steve hastily refolded the sketch, stuffed it back into the book with the photos, and shoved the whole thing back into the pack. Several things had just become horribly, painfully clear.

And every one of them one day too late.

\-----

He’s been in Cairo for about twenty-four hours when he’s awakened by a call from a number he doesn’t recognize. Since most calls he gets are from numbers he doesn’t recognize, he answers without any real alarm, still half-asleep and thinking it’s probably the chemist he met with the night before.

“Hey, man.” The unexpected familiarity of Clint’s voice jolts him fully awake. “Been awhile.”

It’s been about five months since he threw away Peggy’s message — and nearly a year since the experiment.

Not that Steve’s keeping track.

“Rose give you this number?” he guesses.

“Bobbi, actually,” says Clint. “She and Hunter pulled in your point man twenty minutes ago. Going after the forger next. Says she’ll give you a day’s head-start as a favor to me.”

“Generous.” Steve’s tone is flat, but he mostly means it.

“You gonna take it?”

“Yeah.” He throws off the blanket and starts shoving the few belongings he’s unpacked back into his duffle one-handed. “Yeah, I’ll clear out.”

“Good.” Clint sounds relieved. “Well, okay, I guess that’s all I—”

“Thank you,” Steve cuts in quickly. “Really, thank you for warning me. I know I didn’t leave in the best—”

“Hey, I get it,” Clint interrupts. “Believe me.”

“Right,” says Steve, guilt instantly poking at him. “Any, uh, any leads? On Natasha?”

“No,” says Clint flatly. He lets out a long breath before adding, “I don’t think she exists.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” says Clint with a humorless laugh. “Me too.”

Steve double-checks the hidden pocket where he keeps his back-up IDs and cash before zipping up his bag. The silence has stretched out so long he’s about the check if the call dropped when Clint says abruptly, “So where you off to next?”

“Why?” says Steve. “You inviting me somewhere?”

“I can, if you’re interested,” says Clint. “I’ve got a job lined up in Budapest. No dream-share, just good old-fashioned espionage. I can do it alone but, you know, it’s always nice to have a partner.”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees softly, his eyes sweeping the bare motel room one last time. “It is.”

\-----

It’s a simple surveillance job. The most complex part is planting cameras and microphones in the mark’s office, and even that looks to be simple enough with the mark away on business for a week. They go in Saturday morning disguised as building maintenance, the lone guard barely giving them a glance. Once inside, Steve heads to the office, while Clint makes for the electrical room to conceal the remote transmitter.

Steve plants the mics in less than a minute, but setting up the cameras is more time-consuming. He’s just about finished with the second one when Clint’s tinny voice suddenly crackles through his earpiece.

“Rogers, heads up, we’re not alone.”

“Somebody getting some weekend work in?” They can explain their presence away easily enough, but the fewer people who see their faces or know they were here, the better.

“Maybe,” says Clint. “Stand b— _shit_!”

The earpiece goes dead.

“Barton?” Steve taps at his ear. “Barton, you there?”

Then he hears it: footsteps in the hall.

Heading straight for him.

He pulls out his gun and aims it at the door, positioning himself behind the desk so that he can easily drop behind it for shelter if he needs to. A second later the door bursts open and a man steps through, weapon raised, movements precise and efficient.

Then his eyes meet Steve’s and he freezes.

“Shit,” says Steve. He holsters his gun and runs a hand through his hair, frowning at the projection.

Because there’s no question it’s a projection: it’s Bucky — albeit Bucky as Steve’s never projected him before, bearded and longer-haired and still frozen, gun aimed at nothing in particular, eyes fixed on Steve’s face.

“Can you tell me how long I’ve been under?” asks Steve, sighing. He casts his mind back, trying to think when he could have been grabbed, but he comes up blank. He remembers making the plan with Clint, remembers coming here, is pretty sure he remembers everything, which means whoever pulled him under is the best he’s ever seen.

Perfect. As if his life needed more dream-related complications.

“Steve?” The barely audible whisper is shaky. 

Steve focuses back on the projection. His gun is hanging limply in his right hand, while his left fumbles in the pocket of his jacket. It’s an odd way for a projection to behave, even this particular one, and Steve hopes whatever compound these assholes are using isn’t going to permanently screw up his brain.

“I don’t have time for this,” Steve tells him, looking around the room for a window big enough to fit through. Jumping will be safer than shooting since he doesn’t know what’s in this batch of somnacin. “So unless you can tell me who did this or what they—”

“This is real.” Bucky’s voice is such a broken mix of hope and disbelief that Steve’s eyes snap back to him. He’s staring at Steve with outright wonder. The hand in his jacket pocket is still.

Steve smiles sadly at him. “We’ve been through this, Buck. This is a dream. You’re dead, remember?”

Bucky’s expression doesn’t change.

“Not anymore,” he says softly.

“You know that’s not how it works,” says Steve. He’s trying to keep his emotions at bay, trying to treat the projection _as_ a projection… but it’s _Bucky_ and he looks so hopeful and heartbroken all at once. “It’s just a dream, Buck. You’re not real.”

“I am,” says Bucky, dropping his gun and stepping toward Steve and, “I _am_,” he repeats, more firmly.

“Fuck!”

Bucky freezes again. Then he slowly raises his hands, warily eyeing the gun Steve is pointing at him.

“Nice job,” says Steve, voice hard. “You almost had me fooled.”

“What are you talking about?” says Bucky.

The person pretending to be Bucky.

“Don’t patronize me,” Steve snaps. “You’re a forger. Pretty good, too. Hair’s a little long, though.”

“Haircuts haven’t exactly been a priority,” says the forger, with just the hint of a smirk.

“Hilarious,” says Steve. “Why did you put me under?”

“I didn’t,” says the forger, and Steve has to hand it to them: it’s almost convincing.

“You can tell me here,” says Steve, “or I can drop us both and you can tell me out there. But my partner—”

“_No!_” The fear that sparks to life in Bucky’s eyes looks so horribly, painfully genuine that Steve almost shoots him just so he doesn’t have to see it. He’s impressed against his will that whoever it really is still hasn’t dropped the forge. “You can’t shoot yourself, Steve, this is real!”

“If you wanted me to believe that, you shouldn’t have impersonated a dead man,” says Steve, unmoved.

“I’m not— I thought you were dead too!” says the forger, and the desperation in their — in _Bucky’s_ — voice, almost palpable, gives Steve pause. “Dammit, listen to me for once! Don’t you have a totem?”

Steve pauses. Recalls this — forger? projection? — whatever-they-are fumbling in their jacket pocket.

_This is real._

Very slowly, Steve reaches to his throat with his left hand and tugs the dog tags free — runs his fingers over the numbers — tries to make them melt together —

Bucky steps forward and takes the gun out of Steve’s right hand as the tags slip through his fingers.

“This is real,” Steve whispers.

“I told you,” Bucky murmurs and crushes their mouths together and _this is real_ because it’s nothing like a kiss Steve would dream up, all softness and tenderness and fulfilled promises, it’s messy and filthy and filled with so much desperation he feels like he’s suffocating but can’t even bring himself to give a damn because _this is real_.

Bucky is real.

Bucky is real, he’s alive, he’s _here_, it’s a miracle, it’s—

Steve pulls abruptly away, his blood turning cold as he snatches his gun from the desk with one hand while the other closes around Bucky’s wrist, yanking him to the floor.

“Fuck, fuck, _fuck_.”

“What’s wrong?” Bucky asks. “Steve, what—”

“Why did you come here?” Steve hisses urgently. “What job are you—”

“No job,” says Bucky, bewildered. “We got intel an architect—” the color suddenly drains from his face. “This is a setup.”

Steve tightens his grip on his wrist. “I am not losing you again.”

Bucky brings his free hand up to cup Steve’s cheek.

“Never,” he murmurs. His thumb strokes along Steve’s cheekbone once before he removes it to touch his own ear. “Nat, you there?” His arm twitches nervously in Steve’s grasp. “Natalia, _do you copy_?”

Steve reluctantly releases Bucky’s wrist (it’s either that or the gun) to try to activate his own earpiece. “Barton, you reading me?”

Bucky’s eyes are darting back and forth, his expression growing increasingly alarmed. It seems he, like Steve, isn’t receiving a response.

“We need to get out of here,” says Bucky. “There’s a stairwell at the end of the hall, about thirty—”

“—yards to the left, yeah,” Steve finishes, but he grabs Bucky’s arm again, stopping him from rising. “We don’t know what’s out there. It could be a trap.”

“Hold on, I think I need to check my totem again,” says Bucky, smirking slightly. “I could only _dream_ of a Steve Rogers who would advise _caution_.”

Steve rolls his eyes, but says seriously, “Yeah, well, I’ve learned a lot in the last year.”

“I bet,” says Bucky softly. He runs a finger along the edge of Steve’s beard and Steve shivers slightly, aching to lean into the touch, but he can’t afford to get distracted right now.

“All right,” he says, “I’ll go first and signal if it’s clear. If—”

“Absolutely not!” Bucky interrupts. “I’m not letting you walk into a trap alone, Rogers.”

“_Possible_ trap,” Steve counters. “And I’m certainly not gonna let you do it.”

For a moment they glare at each other, but then Bucky lets out a little laugh, shaking his head, and gives Steve a quick kiss.

“God, I missed you, you reckless idiot,” he mutters. “All right, fine, we don’t have time to argue, so you can go first, but know that if it _is_ a trap, I’m not just gonna run the other way and save myself.”

“Now who’s the reckless idiot,” Steve grumbles, but it’s not like he really expected anything else. “Okay, on the count of three, I’ll—”

The muffled sound of gunfire coming from the direction of the stairwell cuts him off.

“Shit, new plan: we—”

The door to the stairs opens with a bang. More gunshots follow.

“Could really use that ugly-ass shield right about now,” Bucky mutters with a grin.

“It wasn’t ugly,” Steve protests automatically, unable to hold back his own smile, despite everything. It feels _so good_ to be bantering with Bucky again — to be doing _anything_ with him again, even if it is facing down a strike team.

“I swear to god,” Bucky growls, “if you die ninety seconds after I found you—”

“That is not gonna happen,” says Steve firmly, though in truth he has no idea how he’s going to get them out of this. “We just need to—”

“You boys planning on helping out at some point, or do I have to do everything myself?”

The tension pours out of Bucky’s body.

“Nat!” He scrambles to his feet, reaching down to pull Steve up after him, and Steve’s mouth falls open when the woman who just rescued them comes into view.

“_Natasha?_”

Her hair is black and her features noticeably younger, but there’s no question it’s the same woman from Clint’s dreams.

“Captain America,” she says. “And here I thought Clint was just delirious.”

“Clint?” says Bucky. “Wait a minute… _Barton_?” He whips around to look at Steve, half glaring. “_Clint Barton_ is your partner? _Nat’s_ Clint Barton?”

“Yes, James, you’re about five minutes behind,” says Natasha impatiently. “I assume you idiots were making out while Clint and I were actually saving our asses?” She gives a half-smile. “Just like the old days. Can we go?”

“Where is Clint anyway?” Steve asks as they follow Natasha, picking their way through the frankly alarming number of bodies littering the hall and stairs.

“Securing our getaway,” says Natasha. “We’ll rendezvous with him at the airfield in two hours. Pick up the pace, Cap.”

\-----

“Keep that up and we’ll lose the security deposit,” Natasha deadpans two hours and ten minutes later when she pokes her head out of the cockpit of the private jet Clint commandeered for them to find Steve and Bucky making out on the couch in the cabin. Steve instantly tries to pull away, his face hot, but Bucky just tightens his embrace, holding Steve even more securely on his lap.

“Fuck you, Nat,” he says cheerfully over Steve’s shoulder.

“No, James, not when I’m in a very tiny plane with other people,” says Natasha severely. “That’s just rude.”

“You’re just jealous you can’t do it because your boyfriend has to fly the plane,” Bucky accuses.

“Not the point,” says Natasha. “Just keep it in your pants for the duration of the flight, please. The only thing separating us is a curtain, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah, fine,” says Bucky, releasing Steve, who tumbles onto the cushion beside him and half buries his face in Bucky’s shoulder. “How much longer?”

“Two-and-a-half hours, give or take,” says Natasha. “I assume you can handle that?”

“Cockblocker,” Bucky mutters resentfully as she pulls the cockpit curtain closed. He reaches over to haul Steve back into his lap, but Steve pulls back. “Ugh, not you too! What happened to the Steve Rogers who broke all the rules?”

“You still haven’t told me what happened to you after you woke up,” says Steve, in an attempt to distract him.

“I’ll tell you later,” Bucky whines. He tugs at the hem of Steve’s shirt. “Come on, Steve, we’ve been waiting for this for ten years!”

“Then a few more hours should be nothing,” says Steve, staunchly ignoring his exaggerated pout. “I’ve filled you in on everything with me. It’s only fair you do the same.”

“Nothing about this is fair,” Bucky grumbles, but he settles down beside Steve, draping an arm around his shoulders and drawing him against his side. “All right, what do you want to know?”

“Let’s start at the beginning,” says Steve. “You died when we went after Zola, woke up at Hood, and took the facility hostage.”

Bucky’s playful, pouty demeanor vanishes in an instant.

“You know about that, huh?”

“It’s pretty much the _only_ thing I know,” says Steve.

“Right,” says Bucky. “Well, the experiment lasted three days, but I woke up after just nine hours. Hood was a little more involved in the planning stages — we got more training than most of the other subject groups — and I wasn’t under that long, so I realized immediately what had happened. Grabbed the handler as soon as he walked in. Security came right after, but what could they do? Couldn’t use tasers with all the electronics, and definitely couldn’t risk sending a bullet into anyone still under: it’d screw with the data.” He gives a humorless laugh. “As soon as I figured out they couldn’t tell me where you were, I got everyone locked in the control room and grabbed a PASIV from one of the later phases.”

“Later phases?”

“New groups got plugged in every twelve hours — twelve years in there,” Bucky explains. “New generation, you know. We were phase one; Barton and Nat were five and six. But it all dialed into the same network, it was just timing.

“I grabbed one and ran. Took me about ten hours to get secure enough to plug in. I figured I’d find you in there, arrange a place to meet, then wake you. But of course you’d been awake basically as long as I had.”

“I was already in Vegas,” murmurs Steve.

“Yeah,” says Bucky. “Well that was a setback, but I wasn’t gonna let the tech go to waste. I could only do it for five, sometimes ten minutes at a time before I’d have to run again, but that was a few weeks in there. Long enough to track down one or two people and wake them.”

“You were the Ghost,” says Steve, comprehension dawning.

Bucky laughs ruefully.

“Yeah, I started hearing that name around phase four. At first I was just trying to get our friends out, but even that was harder than it sounds. I had to be careful how I did it. Couldn’t risk setting off the projections, you know, so it wasn’t like I could just blink myself into someone’s living room and shoot them. I had to play by waking rules. And the device I grabbed always dumped me in Moscow — never did figure that one out — so I’d lose a few days getting to the West. Never could forge for shit, so the only real advantage I had was dreaming up currency and weapons.

“Eventually I realized SHIELD was where they were monitoring internally, so I started taking out their guys too. Losing battle, though. Wake one, they’d just plug in two more.”

Steve sits up a little so he can look at Bucky more fully, frowning slightly. “Why didn’t you just blow up their HQ?”

“Too risky,” says Bucky with a small shrug. “Something that big in the nexus could overload the system.”

“Cause a collapse, you mean,” says Steve. “But that’s good, it’d wake everyone up.”

“No, it’d overload the system,” Bucky repeats. “They really didn’t tell you anything at SLO, did they?” he adds, when Steve just continues to frown at him. “Something that big for that long, no one’s subconscious could sustain that, they’d go insane. It was all run through AI, so a system overload wouldn’t just cause a collapse, it’d fry the whole thing and the brain of anyone plugged in.” He smiles wryly. “It was all on the waiver… in very small print, of course.”

“Minuscule, I’m sure,” says Steve sardonically.

“Yeah, well,” says Bucky. “I gave up getting rid of the monitors, but I did use them to learn about the people involved on the outside. Made it easier, when it was over, to track down a goon or two and get information about architects and— and subjects.” His voice breaks a little on the last word. “It didn’t take long to get a rough idea of what happened. You were dead, Stark was dead—” He pauses for a moment, then says quietly, “I was sorry about that. I didn’t know about Maria when I woke him.”

“You couldn’t,” says Steve at once. “And it would have happened anyway. The projections weren’t your fault.”

“I know,” says Bucky softly, more like he’s trying to convince himself than agreeing. He takes a second to compose himself before continuing more strongly, “So you were both gone, and Carter was safe and out of it with her girl; it didn’t seem right to drag them back in. So I went back to doing what I’d done in the experiment. Only instead of waking subjects, I was taking out architects.”

Steve gapes at him. “You’re the one who’s been killing the architects?”

“I’m not proud of it,” says Bucky, “but yes. That’s actually how I met Nat. We went after the same general a few months ago. She was pretty pissed when she found out I was the guy killing off all her leads before she could question them.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t too happy about that myself,” says Steve. “So you two teamed up?”

“Yep,” says Bucky. “She told me about Barton, and I promised I’d do whatever I could to help her find him. I modified my M.O. so she could question the marks before I killed them but it didn’t make a difference. No one could tell us what happened to him.”

“Buck,” says Steve softly, “why did you kill them at all? You had to know it wouldn’t change anything.”

“Wouldn’t it?” says Bucky; he sounds genuinely surprised. “I haven’t been doing it just out of revenge, Steve. I won’t pretend that’s not part of it, but it’s never been my sole motivation. The aftermath of this experiment was messy, no question, but the Dream itself more or less worked as intended. The more architects left alive, the greater the likelihood they’ll do it again. I’m trying to prevent what was done to us from being done to someone else.”

“Yeah, okay,” says Steve. He’s done his fair share of things he’s not proud of for much worse reasons. “I get that.”

“Of course,” says Bucky, “now I’m reconsidering my position.”

“What do you mean?” asks Steve.

Bucky tangles a hand in the back of Steve’s hair and gently tugs his head back until Steve meets his now heated gaze.

“I mean,” he says, his other hand tracing a slow pattern along Steve’s inner thigh, “if it hadn’t been for that experiment, we never would have met.”

“And we never would have lost each other,” Steve points out, even as his thoughts start to scatter.

“And we never would have found each other again,” Bucky murmurs.

“Well,” says Steve breathlessly, “I guess that’s something.”

Bucky ducks forward and fastens their mouths together, slick and hot and gloriously sensuous.

“That,” he rumbles against Steve’s lips, “is everything.”

\-----

“Okay…. Okay, sounds good…. I’ll let you know…. You too.” Bucky ends the call and turns to Steve, who just clambered into bed and is eyeing him curiously. “Nat and Clint are pulling a job in Sydney and wonder if we’d like to join.”

“Aren’t they supposed to be on their honeymoon?”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “Nat says they’re multitasking. Think the girls will want in? I can run next door in the morning and ask them.”

“It’s their fifty-third anniversary tomorrow,” Steve reminds him.

Bucky gives a low whistle. “Hard to believe.”

“Yeah.” Especially since they celebrated Angie’s twenty-first birthday just a few weeks ago. Eighteen months on and it still bends Steve’s mind that Peggy and Angie lived an entire lifetime in a matter of days, even when he got nearly an extra decade overnight. Most of the time he tries not to think about it. “Think we’d have made it fifty-three years? If we hadn’t died in the war, I mean.”

Bucky snorts. “I think it’d have taken at least fifty-_four_ years for us to stop being idiots and admit our feelings to each other.”

“All those years we’d have wasted.” Steve shakes his head. “Something else to thank the architects for, I guess.”

The list is maybe longer than he’d like. Another thing he tries not to think about.

“True. Although I don’t think matchmaking was their primary goal,” says Bucky. His tone is light, but Steve knows that, despite his grudging gratitude, it still rankles him that there are architects who got away with it. He’s stopped hunting them, but they’re both aware that moratorium will cease the second there’s so much as a whisper of a second experiment. Steve’s ready for when that call inevitably comes, but he’s also grateful for every day the reprieve lasts.

Bucky flips off the lights and slides next to Steve, throwing an arm around him and pulling him close.

“Okay, so we’ll leave the girls to celebrate,” he murmurs against Steve’s ear. “What do you say? I’ll take you to one of those places where they let you pet the koalas.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” mumbles Steve, which they both know means _yes_. He presses back against Bucky’s chest and before long surrenders to the relentless pull of sleep—not to chase after Bucky’s shadow in the darkness, but to rest in the quiet and then meet him again in the light of dawn, solid and alive and wonderfully, miraculously _real_.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to the amazing and talented [iladylittlefinger](http://iladylittlefinger.tumblr.com/) for the beautiful artwork. Many thanks to my wonderful sister for being a fantastic beta and even more fantastic cheerleader; I truly could not have done it without her. Many thanks to the awesome mods for organizing the Bang and making it such a great experience. And as always, many thanks to you for reading.


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